I have now given up on it. I respect the folks on FoM (or F0M as I like to call it), and I take their word that he knows his mathematics. He seems to know more of it than I do, anyway. But now that I am older, I am more able to accept that I just don't get certain things, and this chap I am afraid is going to be one of those. Plus the Platonism is annoying. One interesting tie up between his writing and your posts: I notice that (outside of Ian's contributions) there is definitely a Two Cultures thing in these fields and the discussions on this list. I posted some attempt at humour on this on PEN-L a while (e.g: Julia vs Joan Robinson, Barkley Rosser father vs son, etc). Badiou, like you, seems to be flipping between these two cultures in a dizzying way, and I don't think I can keep up (with Ian, Badiou, or you!).
>
> The other book worth mentioning is Ouine, Ontological relativity and
> other essays.
>
s/Ouine/Quine/
> (I gotta go. My windows system is badly corrupted by somekind of
> adware that I can't get
> rid of. Suggestions?
Upgrade to FreeBSD or GNU/Linux. And...
> Meanwhile, I installed Ubuntu and got it up and running, but can't
> get the
> internet connection to work. I did the usual info on IP address,
> Gateway, DNS. rebooted,
> and so forth. But I didn't set the box up as a network. Maybe there
> is something in the
> network system that needs to be installed---any suggestions are
> welcome)
You shouldn't need to install anything additional for basic networking (WINSOCK.DLL anyone?!) but who knows... these days these distros have taken on the idea that stripping the OS of features is what makes it "user friendly". Anyway, ranting aside... can you do the following once you login to the Ubuntu system, and send me the output (you can contact me on chat -- Google Chat : platosbeard):
$ ifconfig -a $ netstat -nr $ netstat -nr | perl -ne '/^default\s+([\d\.]+)/ && system("ping -c 3 $1");' $ netstat -nr | perl -ne '/^0\.0\.0\.0\s+([\d\.]+)/ && system("ping -c 3 $1");' $ cat /etc/resolv.conf $ cat /etc/nsswitch.conf $ host www.google.com
--ravi